At the heart of every successful novel are good characters. And by ‘good’ I don’t mean a character who never does anything bad, is kind to small animals and children, and never swears. Well written characters bring a story to life and give the reader someone to care about, root for, or even love to hate.
Real people are
complex, contradictory and paradoxical. A character in a story is a sketch of a
real person, with just enough detail to make them believable. It’s the reader’s
imagination that fills in the gaps and brings your characters to life. This
doesn’t mean your characters should be simple or black and white. A stereotype
makes for a very bad character.
Character Equals Story
So what makes a good
character? You create a character
in order to tell a story, so the character must serve the story. What this
story is, depends upon the character.
In fact, the story
arises from the character. The protagonist is driven by desires and inner
conflict to seek something they believe they need, and this is what will drive
the story. If your character doesn’t want anything, you have no story.
So every character
should want something, even if it’s just a perfect cup of tea, and the story
follows them in their quest.
The best stories have
characters that reflect and embody the conflict at the heart of the story. That
conflict is the theme, or premise, and a good main character will dramatise the
premise of your story. In other words, without the protagonist, the story
wouldn’t happen.
The story unfolds the
way it does because the character is the way they are.
For example, in Prey by Michael Crichton, the
protagonist is Jack Forman. He’s an unemployed programmer, stuck at home all
day looking after his kids, and losing his focus and motivation. He drifts into
dealing with a problem with some runaway nanotechnology almost by accident. He
doesn’t really want to do it. It just kind of happens. It forces him to come
out fighting – for his life.
The theme of the novel
is that humans don’t really know what they’re doing; they stumble into
discoveries and new technologies without really thinking it through and end up
causing themselves more problems – often life threatening ones – just like Jack
does in the story.
A bad example of a main
character is Robert Langdon in The Da
Vinci Code by Dan Brown. The ‘symbologist’ is called in to decipher a code
and gets embroiled in a story which really has nothing to do with him. He has
no personal stake in what unfolds. He’s a cipher designed to deliver the plot.
Dan Brown tried to make the character more ‘rounded’ by giving him a random
character flaw – Langdon suffers from claustrophobia. But this has no effect on
the unfolding of the story. It doesn’t stop him chasing down clues or prevent
his escape from the bad guys. All in all, it makes for a pretty flat experience
as a reader.
Sanctus by Simon Toyne is an example of what The Da Vinci Code could have been. The main protagonist is
journalist Liv Adamsen. But she’s not chasing the story because she’s a journo.
She’s chasing it because her brother is the centre of the mystery – the brother
she hasn’t seen for 8 years and believed was dead. The fact that these two
characters are twins is central to the plot and directly puts Liv’s life in
danger. She is literally the only
person who can solve the mystery. The character is intimately entwined into the
story.
Character or Story?
So when you’re
constructing a story, do you begin with the character or with the story?
It would seem the best
solution is to start with your premise or story idea and then find a character
to embody it. This can be a useful approach because the premise and theme will
help you to fill in character details, which will then suggest story
developments you can plug back into your plot.
However, in practice it
rarely works this way – at least, not for me. In reality ideas often spring
upon you fully loaded with characters. It seems that the story and characters
arrive together. If this happens you’ll need to check that your protagonist is
the right man or woman for the job.
Before you launch into
writing the story, you can deconstruct your characters and tweak them to fit
the premise. Do this as early into the writing as possible – at the outline
stage – and when you come to write the story, your characters will work
perfectly.
None of this planning
and preparation will stop your characters from revealing hidden secrets or
changing their nature completely while you’re writing the story. There’s not
much you can do about this except learn to trust the process. Keep checking in
with your premise to make sure you’re not wandering too far astray, and trust
what comes up. Letting your characters dictate the plot and declaim their own
dialogue isn’t always a bad thing, but then, that depends on how well written
they are in the first place…
Image: mannequin
